Back in 2010, Shady Characters got started with a collection of articles on unusual marks of punctuation. Each mark, such as the pilcrow (¶), interrobang (‽) and ampersand (&), is covered in a separate series, and I’ve since added an ongoing series about emoji. Read them all here:
- The Pilcrow (¶)
- The Interrobang (‽)
- The Octothorpe (#)
- The Ampersand (&)
- The @-symbol
- Irony & Sarcasm Marks
- Emoji (😂)
There are also occasional series on Field Trips (journeys to places of special interest to punctuation-philes) and Shiny Characters (forays into the world of typesetting), and I continue to publish regular articles on punctuation, books and everything in between. Visit the home page, subscribe to the RSS feed, or sign up for email notifications to get new articles as they appear.
Alternatively, you may wish to take a look at the list of articles I’ve written for publication elsewhere.
Comment posted by Richard Trevor on
Hi
I have thoroughly enjoyed your blogs and Sha@dy Charac†ers.
I wonder if you have looked into wind symbols at all? Not the artistic emojis: I mean the more scientific circles with barbs or arrows, used to describe wind direction and strength in weather forecasts—but, oddly, unavailable as unicode symbols, which suggests some sort of discordance somewhere.
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Richard — thanks for the comment! I haven’t looked into those symbols, but I note that there are at least a few weather-related emoji. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before more are adopted?